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The Continuing Forum is open to all readers so that they may send their reactions, suggestions, criticism and contributions to the topics which are presented in The Psychoanalytic Forum.
(Dr. Simon's discussion was received as Volume I, Number 2 went to press. Dr. Litman, the author, now responds.)
To the Editors: In my paper I criticized clinicians who isolate certain of Freud's formulations and use them as a justification for an “overemphasis on aggression and guilt as components of suicide with underemphasis of the helplessness, dependency and erotic elements.”
Dr. Simon commented that in comprehensively reviewing Freud's work, we touch the “epistomological philosophical frontier of psychoanalytic theory which is the death instinct; but in his role as original contributor he [Litman] focuses so sharply upon the therapeutic-prophylactic issues as to blur the main province of psychoanalysis which lies between psychotherapy and philosophy.”
In a psychoanalytic patient studied under research conditions, Dr. Simon observed that significant death responses occurred only when specific transference frustrations reactivated powerful aggressive impulses against both parents about which the patient felt guilty and turned back upon herself. Dr. Simon states that “while it may be therapeutically valuable to deemphasize aggression in the suicidal patient, the metapsychological validity of that shift has yet to be demonstrated.”
To this I can only comment, Dr. Simon is right. I do not see how a metapsychological theory of suicide can overlook the death instinct and its clinical derivatives, destruction turned inward and aggression turned outward. Intuitively I agree with Freud and Simon that there is a death instinct which operates with terrifying intensity in human affairs, but this concept belongs to the half-acre of metapsychology called the “Economic Aspect” in which we struggle fruitlessly, probably because we lack suitable tools.
Recently, however, there have been exciting deve